Framed Black Panther spent 27 years in jail

By Dan Whitcomb, Reuters, 23 October 2000

LOS ANGELES— He spent years in solitary confinement talking to
the ants crawling across his prison cell floor, convinced they were
bringing him food. Now he chats by cell phone with Marlon Brando.

Geronimo Pratt does not brood about his 27 years behind bars—or
about the evidence his lawyers found showing he was framed for a crime
he never committed, possibly because late FBI director J. Edgar
Hoover wanted the Black Panther leader neutralized.

Pratt shrugs off talk about Hollywood movie deals—actor Sean
Penn is interested in his story and Brando is a frequent
caller—and his mantle as America’s so-called Last
Political Prisoner, a status he earned in 1997 when a judge threw out
his murder conviction and set him free.

I don’t know if you call it bitterness, it’s water
under the bridge, Pratt said in an interview with Reuters.

Like we say, it ‘done happened.’ But, yeah, you
wouldn’t want it to happen to no one else’s child, so you
try to come out and expose the true culprits who make money and make
fun, make all kind of things in their silly minds, their sick minds,
by putting someone in prison for the rest of their lives or messing up
someone’s family.

Pratt has come a long way since 1972, when a jury found him guilty of
murdering 27-year-old teacher Caroline Olsen in Santa Monica two years
earlier, unaware of evidence that the FBI had him under surveillance
at a Panther meeting 333 miles away at the time she was shot to death.

He was represented at that trial by Johnnie Cochran, now best known
for winning an acquittal on murder charges for O.J. Simpson but then a
young defense attorney. The two discussed the case and its aftermath
to help promote a new book about the case, Last Man Standing,
the Tragedy and Triumph of Geronimo Pratt (Doubleday) by writer
Jack Olsen.

Naive Lawyer Confesses

I was very naive at the time of the trial. I felt I was going to
win this case because I felt this was an innocent man, Cochran
said in an interview with Reuters.

Geronimo always said: ‘They’re out to get me,
they’re out to get me,‘ and I would always say:
‘Who’s they? Who you talking about?’ Well, I later
learned ‘they’ was the FBI, the LAPD (the Los Angeles
police department) and the L.A. District Attorney’s Office.

Pratt. now 53, was sentenced to life in prison and spent his first
eight years in solitary confinement alongside such neighbors as cult
murderer Charles Manson. He was cut off from contact with the outside
world after prosecutors branded him so dangerous that he could seize
control of the entire prison.

He survived a quarter century in California’s toughest prisons
with mental toughness earned during a childhood in the Louisiana
swamps and two Vietnam War combat tours, he said.

I never felt like I was going to break. I did feel like I was going
to check out—many a time. Then you end up escaping mentally and
all of a sudden you find yourself free. That is the first time I
experienced what I called true freedom, he said.

I went to Manila (in my mind) and saw the ‘Thrilla in
Manila,’ he said, referring to the famous 1975 boxing match
between Muhammad Ali and Joe Frazier. I thought to myself:
‘I’m in the deepest hole there is, and I’m
free.’ I couldn’t believe that I actually saw that
fight. I later learned that was an eastern discipline called Astral
Projection.

With no human contact aside from the guards, whom he considered
straight up, the enemy, Pratt became desperate for any
distraction, eventually turning to the ants that crawled through his
cell and bit him regularly on the arms and legs.

I learned that the most intelligent living creatures that
I’ve ever ran into were those ants. They would bite me and I
would slap them and get mad and then they would bite me some
more. Then you realize: ‘What am I fighting for? This is their
territory, their turf, they outnumber you,’ he said.

So I stopped killing them and I just submitted to them. And then I
noticed that one day they began to come in and pile their crumbs in
the corner and they had stopped biting my legs. And I started
meditating and concentrating and focusing on that. And I started to
get messages back,

He went on.

I don’t talk to most people about this because they
don’t have the mind to comprehend, but those (ants), they are so
intelligent, after we started doing that they never bit me again. What
they were doing was, they were bringing me food. They were actually
bringing me food.

Pratt was finally moved out of solitary after his long-time attorney
Stuart Hanlon challenged his treatment as unfair. But he would spend
another 19 years in prison, his appeals rejected by judges at every
level, before Orange County Superior Court Judge Everett Dickey set
him free.

Water Under The Bridge

He said he came away from his experience determined to change the
U.S. criminal justice system but at the same time showing little
bitterness about his years wasted in prison.

I want to expose this evilness that’s set in place,
that’s institutionalized, that includes everything they call the
criminal justice system, he said. The prison industrial complex
is very evil. It’s like a doomsday machine.

And Pratt, who since his release has moved home to Louisiana, said he
has no regrets about his days as a revolutionary, despite the terrible
price he paid.

Well, you know, we were young and naive and everybody was just
fired up back in that day, trying to make a change. But the difference
was, we were trying to do what was right. We weren’t out here
raping and robbing and killing people like. . .all this crime
today. We were not criminals, he said.

Cochran remembers the day Pratt was freed as the best in his long
career as a lawyer and insists that he would rather be defined by this
case than by Simpson—- a man whose picture dominates the entry
of Cochran’s law firm.

It’s terrible. I don’t want my epitaph to be:
‘Here lies Johnnie Cochran, he once defended
O.J. Simpson,’ Cochran said, sitting in his office under a
framed copy of the New York Times front page from the day that Simpson
was acquitted.

If you want to talk about my career, this case defines my career,
Geronimo Pratt. And that’s very important to me. This is a story
they ought to hear.